“It’s truly alarming that this has happened,” he told The Associated Press by telephone from Mali’s capital, Bamako, on Monday. “They torched all the important ancient manuscripts. The ancient books of geography and science. It is the history of Timbuktu, of its people.”

Apparently they've been destroying other historical sites and artifacts as well.

Much as it's tempting to call in the Piranha Brothers to deal with that little Borg cube in Mecca, I'd vastly prefer something of completely natural origin. A very localized magnitude 9.6 earthquake that destroys the Ka'aba but harms no living things sounds about right.

Okay, something like that would definitely stretch the definition of "natural" just a bit, but it'd be quite apt.

The city’s mayor, exiled far away in Mali’s capital, alleged that the Islamist extremists had torched the manuscript libraries, burning them to the ground. This was quickly disproved by a Sky TV crew embedded with the French soldiers, who found the main library intact, alleviating the worst fears of many scholars.

Inside the library, television reports showed a few small piles of ash, along with dozens of empty boxes. Up to 10,000 manuscripts were gone. The immediate assumption was that the Islamist militia groups had stolen or destroyed them – although subsequent reports suggested that many of them had been hidden and saved.

love how they can burn important documents and no one really does anything about it, they can burn our flags...where are the riots? where's the upset?but when someone burns their precious koran, or holy books, or says a bad word about it, holy hell is breaking lose. never mind that the history books are slightly more accurate and important that a religious book of any kind. people are idots. again and again, we are shown they are idiots who can't control themselves yet demand all the power.and the korean missle idea isn't all that bad of one...better to blow up over there, than over here if it's gonna go off. i'm on the west coast, and i wouldn't be shocked to learn that their missle can travel further than we've anticipated..or been told.

The behavior of extremists muslims is despicable. I was outraged when the taliban destroyed the buddhist statues, and this outrages me even more. How can anyone defend this kind of behavior? And yet, just a few months ago, people were excusing jihad and bristling at the characterization of jihadists as barbarians because israel is so horrible. I don't care how damned horrible israel is, there is no excuse for violent acts against anyone outside of the 'conflict', and those that destroy history... I can't quite express my anger towards those criminals.

NB: it doesn't have to be this way. The egyptians value their pre-muslim heritage. The turks converted haglia sofia into a mosque but left it pretty much intact. Muslims have been pretty tolerant folks, and have a long history of respect for knowledge. The criminal and murderous activities of those intent on destroying any instance of non-islamic civilization they encounter need to be stopped. This is crap!

“It’s truly alarming that this has happened,” he told The Associated Press by telephone from Mali’s capital, Bamako, on Monday. “They torched all the important ancient manuscripts. The ancient books of geography and science. It is the history of Timbuktu, of its people.”

Apparently they've been destroying other historical sites and artifacts as well.

There is some irony in the fact that most of the books would be by Islamic scholars; the mujahedin seem to believe the alleged excuse for the burning of the library at Alexandria:

Caliph Omar is reputed to have said, of the Library's books, "they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous."[1]